94 RüdigerKunow
This was especially so during the recurrent bouts of yellow fever^43
whichhitpracticallyallthemajorportsasfarnorthasNewYork(1668)
and Boston (1691), and was endemic throughout the trans-Atlantic
maritime world. In the United States, the 1793 Philadelphia epidemic
has received much attention in medical and cultural histories (Kraut,
SilentTravelers25-30;Lynch780-87;Powell30-46).Inthatsummer,a
majorepidemicofyellowfeverhitthe"cityofbrotherlylove,"thenthe
largest city and the political as well as the cultural centerof the newly
independent United States. At this symbolically charged location, the
new American governmentality was challenged to find an appropriate
response to a well-known mass disease for which no medical cure was
available at that time. As the number of people infected rose
exponentially day by day, city officials and especially local doctors
madefranticeffortstocombatthedisease,resorting,atleastinitially,to
their usual epidemic tool-kit: infected citizens were quarantined in their
houses or sent to a special fever hospital (a private initiative led by a
committee of local volunteers) or to the pest house which the city had
built on Fisher Island during one of the earlier visitations of the
"pestilence," as Philadelphians would call it. People who displayed the
visible signs of the disease—the yellowish skin color from which the
disease had its name—were cared for by their families (who often also
got infected that way) or, if they could afford it, by local doctors.
Meanwhile, the bodies of thedead were removed by a specially formed
task force composed for the most part of the city's African American
population. Predictably, however, these measures did little to contain a
disease whose etiology was still unknown. As life in the city became
(^43) Yellow fever is an acute virus disease transmitted by mosquitos; classic
symptoms are high fever, jaundice (hence the name), hemorrhage into stomach
andintestines.Mortality ratesareveryhigh(between20and70percent);most
deathsoccurbetween the 7thandthe 10th dayofthe acutestage ofthedisease.
Yellow fever is endemic in Africa and the Americas, especially the Caribbean.
The first recorded outbreak occurred in Barbados in 1647 ("Barbados
distemper"),theninthenexttwoyearsonGuadeloupe,St.Kitts,Cuba,Yucatan
peninsula; last outbreak in the Americas was registered in Trinidad in 1954. In
1881, Carlos Finlay y Barros found the disease vector; his findings were
confirmed in 1900 by the U.S. Army Commission on Yellow Fever, headed by
WalterReed(CooperandKiple1100-07).